#psychiatric power

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"In 1919 Canada’s leading psychiatrist, Dr Charles Clarke, wrote an article in the Public Health Journal in which he reflected on “the chaotic state of affairs in Canada.” “Bolshevism is not a new world disease,” he explained, but merely a hot house product imported from the slum centres of Europe, where degeneracy has produced its inevitable results. The specimens of advocates of their doctrines we have met should never have been admitted to this country, as their influence for evil is difficult to estimate, although it is undoubtedly great. Certainly the ideals which have counted so much in the past in keeping this young country sane, and an example of virility, are in danger as a result of the type of immigration that has been fostered of late years. We have been nursing a reptile that may easily prove our undoing when it is fully developed.

It may seem odd that a doctor was making a contribution to the Red Scare. What did medicine, let alone psychiatry, have to do with radical politics? As it turned out, quite a lot. Thanks to the “science” of eugenics, many prominent members of the medical community joined the chorus of concern about the spread of Red ideas. For these professionals, it was another sign that Canadian society was in poor health, infected by aberrant ways of thinking. Bolshevism was a kind of mental illness; its spread was creating a public health emergency.

A year before his article appeared, Clarke, a professor of psychiatry and dean of the medical school at the University of Toronto, had co-founded the Canadian National Committee for Mental Hygiene (CNCMH). Along with his colleagues Dr Clarence Hincks, medical inspector for the Toronto school system, and Dr Helen MacMurchy, an obstetrician and expert on what were then called the feeble-minded, Clarke used the CNCMH to advocate in support of the fashionable field of eugenics. Conceived in England by the multi-talented Victorian scientist Francis Galton, eugenics proposed that most human deficiencies—mental handicaps, many diseases, physical disability—were inherited and could be eradicated by what were essentially selective breeding practices. Enthusiasts, and Clarke was one, even thought that crime, alcoholism, juvenile delinquency, and other anti-social behaviours were inherited as well.

...

One response to this perceived public health crisis proposed by eugenics activists was to incarcerate people who were considered “feeble-minded,” or “retarded.” Feeble-mindedness was thought to be a menace responsible for all manner of social ills. Once identified, victims had to be shut away in institutions for their own good and for the good of the society they threatened. Another solution was sterilization, preferably voluntary but forced if necessary. The weak and the degenerate had to be stopped from passing on their inferiority. This led to calls for the sterilization of the mentally ill and disabled. Sterilization was endorsed by the National Council of Women and leading medical practitioners across the country. (In 1928 Alberta became the first province to pass a law allowing the involuntary sterilization of “mental defectives”; British Columbia followed suit in 1933.)

Eugenicists also targeted immigration as a source of concern. It may have been that too many “unfit” Canadians were giving birth, they argued, but even more crucial was the arrival of large numbers of immigrants from abroad. The huge influx of newcomers that swept into Canada in the years before the war—three million between 1896 and 1914, a sizeable number of whom were non-Anglo-Saxon in origin—provoked anxiety about the kind of “mongrel” society that was emerging. “Foreigners in large numbers are in our midst,” wrote the Ontario-born Methodist minister and social democrat, J.S. Woodsworth in his 1909 book Strangers Within Our Gates. “More are coming. How are we to make them into good Canadian citizens?” For the most part, British and American immigrants—believed to share the Anglo-Saxon values that dominated mainstream Canadian society—were exempt from these concerns.

But what was to be done about the others, the true “foreigners”? Many observers feared that they were diluting Canada’s true, British character in a sea of ethnic diversity. In the words of one Member of Parliament, Canada had become “the dumping ground for the refuse of every country in the world.” Another Ontario MP declared that Canadians must resist becoming “a nation of organ-grinders and banana sellers.” Others were more circumspect in their language, but basically said the same thing. For instance, Edmonton MP and newspaper publisher Frank Oliver, speaking in the House of Commons in 1903, suggested that many immigrants were “of such class and character as will deteriorate rather than elevate the condition of our people and our country …” Two years after making this statement, Oliver became minister of immigration in Robert Borden’s government.

Eugenics bestowed respectability on these ideas of race prejudice. Eugenicists agreed that Canada was being overwhelmed by the outcasts of Europe, but gave their arguments a scientific gloss. European countries were sending the worst of their people: paupers, slum dwellers, the criminal, the immoral, the mentally defective. Because of the misguided immigration policies of the government, Canada had become, in the words of the Quebec psychiatrist Thomas Burgess, “a ‘dumping ground’ for the degenerates of Europe,” and this was working to downgrade the quality of the Canadian population. The CNCMH threw its efforts behind attempts to restrict the flow of immigrants into Canada, especially immigrants from non Anglo-Saxon sources.

Immigrants were blamed for a rising crime rate in the cities and for swelling the populations in jails and asylums. And they were blamed for providing fertile ground for Bolshevik ideas. As the editor of Saturday Night magazine wrote, he did not think that the average English-speaking worker would be influenced by the “blood-thirsty ravings” of the Canadian Bolsheviks.

Unquestionably, however, our larger cities have very considerable foreign populations, who came to this continent in the belief that in America men could live without working, and who fairly revel in literature of this kind. If the government does not step in and nip the conspiracy in the bud, there is certain to be serious disorder.

Medical activists like Charles Clarke saw a connection between public health and political radicalism. As Clarke’s article in the Public Health Journal made clear, he considered Bolshevism to be a disease in itself, similar to other social problems such as alcoholism or insanity. But in addition to that, it was a temptation; so long as the intellectual capability of the population continued to deteriorate, the Reds would be able to attract ill-informed, feeble-minded followers to their cause, people who were too ignorant to tell dangerous social theories from sensible ones. Scaremongers feared that the Reds might be able to whip up this dangerous majority into the kind of revolutionary mob that had toppled governments in Europe."

- Daniel Francis, Seeing Reds: the Red Scare of 1918-1919, Canada’s First War on Terror. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2011. p. 131, 132-134.

[eligalilei]

ex tempore remarks on (self-)diagnosis and its critics

I wrote most of this up as a comment, but thought it might be worth reposting, since it seemed like a pertinent thing to add to the discussion. I imagine this will get hate, if the enthusiasm of the opposing 'argument' is any indication, but I felt it bore repeating.

Before you jump down my throat about using the word 'enjoyment’ (sive/cum *jouissance*, plastic, &c. + their concepts) in certain contexts… I'll say that all things that serve a psychological function are accompanied by some manner of satisfaction. No, no one has a diagnosis purely recreationally, but they serve a certain role in the constitution of identity psychologically: the constitution of both 'reasons' and ‘causes’ for experiences:, they 'explain' why one is different, and are the foci of communities which offer various sorts of support and camaraderie (nothing said of their more or less positively certain antinomes). So, in that(,) they take on a(/,) not unmelancholic,(/) set of positive emotional valences. Even anger serves to give a kind of enjoyment, if not in the same way as more positive emotions.

I think that these attacks on people who are independently exploring, or merely at the beginning of an undertaking of exploration of, diagnosis are an indicator of some things that are deeply problematic about the psychology and 'politics' of identity in communities built around mental health diagnoses.

What I think is interesting, is that,: while the presence, or perhaps even the mere existence, of 'fakers' and the 'self-diagnosed' (or even just the not-yet-diagnosed) is often decried, few provide any kind of actual reasoning for their being troubled by it, much less one that seems to justify the vitriol, and the need for it to be restated every few days.

Who cares if someone says something on the internet? Who cares if someone 'diagnoses themself? They aren't writing themselves scripts for antipsychotics, ffs (and, let’s all be frank: before c. aripiprazole… who the hell would?) And while there probably have been literal 'fakers' at times, the people doing that clearly have some kind of psychological or social issue (which may, in isolated instances, even be theirs!) and thus deserve our pity, care, and carefully differentiated compassion, not hate. How crazy do you have to be to want to be crazy, exactly? Is such a desire plausible,.. even and especially if its subject(ivities) are capable of bringing them voice?

…

If you can't explain why something bothers you, or the depth of your botherment, I think there's a good chance that the reasoned or plummable cause is might be something with which your conscious mind might not be comfortable, and thus might not be entirely reasonable. Ok, sure, you don't get behind the idea of self-diagnosis, or just the idea of internet diagnosis, but why treat it as something that's a threat to the community? And to treat it as that to the patient themselves, or, much less, that as pathology or nome itself… how hard is it just not to click on a post? (Or, hell… just not to freaking post… lookin’ at you, Jorpers..) … Problem easily avoided.

I feel like the issue has something to do with the way we see psychiatry as being a tiny bit like a church .. (to what extent? And, thatmentioned, some not at all, with their bloody inheritances… ) with True Knowledge being only available through the priest-doctor, as well as maybe envy of those who are able to question diagnosis, which is a kind of substitute satisfaction, or supplement to identity that allows one to excuse one's failings (which we must see as being 'truly real' and 'scientific' in order to be valid, science being the arbiter of truth in this day and age).

On some level, people might feel that if anyone can receive such an identity from oneself, that it undermines the feeling of Truth it gives them. One needs to be seen by one with Knowledge to Actually Have the identity; it's an excuse for failings that must be doled out by one with authority... (which is never yet still quite theirs). if anyone can get it, then it no longer feels as good or 'real' of an excuse, and it fails to be as good of a suture for the severance from the social order which is the illness itself.

Also, all in(/-)groups come with a kind of unconscious enjoyment one can derive from inscribing its borders, and their inscription: only done by exclusion and inclusion. The gaze of the doctor is the means by which this is accomplished, which gives it scienceyness, allows it not be our own acts of inclusion or disclusion, and therefore we're not mean, just being 'Scientific'.

I think that sometimes, the very fact that an explanation is bothersome, might even be a clue that it's in fact true, since the uncomfortable is what is disavowed/repressed into the unconscious, or, rather, never fully constructed in the conscious mind to begin with, and perhaps even learned by imitation.

Honestly, I think the very fact that there are all these weird gatekeeping posts could be an indication that something like what I'm saying is the case; people enjoy communally making borders, and kicking people out, and by placing the onus on psychiatry, this enjoyment can be disavowed. Furthermore, there is else sadly deserving of comment: the idea of allowing people to consider (cf.: etym., *’desire*, ‘divine’ [perhaps astrally…], or even scry,] their own diagnosis as undermining or deprivileging the role of the psychiatrist, thus undermining the psychological 'satisfaction' (or, perhaps more easily understood, the 'role') of diagnosis and/of identity… for themelves, others, or, most comically… médicos themselves.

[penhive]

Power a Discourse

I would like to start this narrative by defining power. Power is defined as the concentration of authority and it is the manipulation of control. I would like to use the following terms to analyze power and they are:

Gnosis-Power

Authoritarian Power

Fetish Power

Metaphysical Power

Psychiatric power

Linguistic Power

Punishment Power

Gnosis Power

Gnosis power stems from the authority exerted by corporations, business houses and the government to keep a tab on people’s activities. Gnosis power involves data collection, snooping electronic surveillance and it also includes the manipulation of the internet to keep track of people’s choices and fee them with their addicted data.

Authoritarian Power

Authoritarian power is the political control exerted by the governments. The individual is never free. Let me use an example. Nazi government is responsible for the hatred of the Jews and the doing of the atrocious holocaust. Further the Nazi government stifled the freedom of the press and the media. I would also like to use another example from the Indian state of Manipur. The majority Hindus supported by the government were committing heinous crimes against the minority Christians. Women were stripped naked, and then paraded on the streets and finally raped. The government just turned its ears deaf and its eyes blind to this rampage.

Fetish Power

Fetish power can be explained as the desire for sexual appetite.  Power is exchanged by the body reciprocally. Power is a voyeuristic narcissistic fetish. The gratification of the body is pleasure maximized.

Metaphysical Power

Metaphysical power is a spiritual tenet of maintaining a relationship with God. God the father has given the free-will of choice to adhere to him. God was not dictatorial or autocratic but a spiritual democrat. Furthermore God became flesh and man to redeem the world from sin with the promise of life as eternity.

Power Psychiatry

Power psychiatry is the manipulation of the individual by psychiatrists. Let me use an example here. Being a chronic alcoholic, I was taken to the psychiatric clinic by my wife and sister and while in consultation the doctor rang the bell and summoned the security and they took me by force and admitted me to the asylum. I had to spend a harrowing one month there. The male nurses were abusive and punitive. Yes psychiatry is a prison of woe and opposed to freedom and dignity.

Linguistic Power

Linguistic power is the use of words and language for wellbeing and prosperity. It involves auto-suggestion and creative visualization. The Philosopher Nietzsche used the term: will to power. Linguistic power is an affirmative celebration of meaning. Language is used to manipulate intentions into reality.

Societal and Cultural Power

Societal and cultural power is the power which wields norms, rules and regulations in an individual’s life. Freud has used the term Super Ego. We have to be clever enough not to break rules but to subvert them. Deify the ID, glorify the ego, and subvert the super ego. We have to live like the fictional character Don Quixote with celebration and merriment. Norms are savage morals we have to subvert and escape them.

[joseigamer]

Patalliro! is fascinating to me because of stuff like this. It's unapologetically gay - even within its anime which aired during primetime hours in 1982 - in a way that many later BL manga would never be, like the ones from the early 2000s which would never dare to call their characters actual homosexuals. Patalliro has actually aged quite well in this regard, there's something comforting about how campy it is.

[ghcstcd]

First week of Intensive Outpatient Therapy, nerds!

[uuuhshiny]

Vladimir Verevochkin in And the Balloon will Return

Good boy

[utilitycaster]

I genuinely believe the fact that so many popular Imogen/Laudna fics are no-powers AU is, if not the main cause, at least a factor in why so many people resist or even are hostile towards any interpretation of Imogen that isn't largely sweet and harmless. Like, write the fic you want, but Imogen in particular is someone so fundamentally shaped by her powers that to write a no powers AU is to write what is essentially a completely original character who happens to share her name.

I think it's made even more obviously a factor because many of those fics try to reconstruct aspects of Imogen's personality by giving her anxiety or agoraphobia (or both) but the problem is that those are purely mental illnesses, rather than something that both gives her powers and penalties (again, the X-Men problem). Some real-world mental illnesses cover the symptoms of Imogen's abilities, but none cover the abilities themselves. It's quite literally a removal of agency: they take away what she can (and frequently does) do with her powers, leaving only the negative effects on her behind while eliminating the negative effects she can have on others. No wonder there's this overwhelming push to woobify her from that corner; they've utterly defanged her and are now crying that other people who can still see her fangs (and even like them) are talking about them.

And the thing is, for all I can be negative about fanon, it is, ultimately, fine - so long one can either keep it separate in one's mind from canon or else remain in a particular fanon sandbox. But unfortunately people leave the sandbox, and when other people respond to the canon Imogen, who as of episode 81 (RIP CRStats) has voluntarily used Detect Thoughts/Open Mind 60 times and has openly stated her intent to use it specifically to know what her party members are doing in advance and theoretically prevent it, the fanfic crowd is utterly unable to react to this intelligently. The idea of Imogen they have is sweet girl with severe anxiety and a goth girlfriend. The problem is this construct exists only in their favorite fanfic writers' domestic fluff modern AU no powers setting. And frankly, I'm not interested in talking about that warped mirror version of her when I could have all the fascination, complexity, glory, and agency of the real thing.

[seaweedstarshine]

Sometimes I think of Amy Pond, who grew up being called mad by those who wielded the word as a tool of exclusion and shame —

Amy Pond, who though forced into the hands of four psychiatrists, still clung to that which they called madness until those systems which elevate psychosocial conformity above humanity stripped it from her —

Amy Pond, whose imaginary friend reappeared for a single hour after twelve years and reignited that faith before disappearing for two more years —

Amy Pond, who spent those those two years under the same implicit threat ingrained in her through psychiatric violence, and thus began to believe the man who stopped the invasion was “just a madman with a box,” only for him to agree, and to also call her “mad, impossible Amy Pond,” reframing madness as non-negative for the first time in her life —

Amy Pond, who ignored the disembodied voice of her imaginary friend even as she ran away with him for real, who still lived each day with the traumatic internalization of deviancy dictated upon her by the psychiatric-industrial complex that shaped her from childhood —

Amy Pond, who wouldn't acknowledge the Doctor's voice, such that it took an Angel in her eye that was literally killing her to ensure she couldn't reality check herself —

Amy Pond, who stood before a room which muttered about “the psychiatrists we brought her to,” and though afraid, escaped their rigid parameters of acceptable existence.

[woosh-floosh]

I didn't know "song of the summer" meant an actual popular song that comes out over the summer. I thought it just meant a song you listen to a lot over the summer, so much so that it defines your summer. When asked what the song of the summer is I've been saying shit like "Unicorns by Colour of course!" and "Atlas of an Eye by Hammer No More the Fingers :)" until my Dad asked "Do you actually think people are listening to that?"

Anyways my Song of the Fucking Summer right here:

[cacaitos]

see for the thing ive observed abt the way the female-to-male predation types of portrayals happen to go, that imo for some reason use like extra stablished power dynamics to like. *justify themselves happening in the first place (like ex mothers that are yk. v straighforward menaces in a kid/teen's inmediacy), is that i will give fujimoto the acknowledgement of partially avoiding doing so by virtue of him not having much respect or shame for himself and his story analogues.

[forensicated]

How many seriously harmed children or murdered children did they want Leon to have to find/deal with/try and resuscitate over his actually rather quite short (about 70 eps) tenure?

Poor darling, especially after the tragic death of his girlfriend (that Leon being Leon, he got called to the scene of!)

"What's that caller? You've a traumatic and haunting thing happening where a young child/vulnerable teen has been hurt and could die/requires CPR/is crying out for help?? It's ok, we'll send our most sensitive, brooding officer who has already dealt with 5 of these sorts of cases this week to your house."

[fatedprophetess-perfectstorms]

I could not have it said better myself.

[methed-up-marxist]

"The study that had the most direct impact on the psychiatric profession— as well as public consciousness—at this time was David Rosenhan’s (1973) classic research On Being Sane in Insane Places which found that psychiatrists could not distinguish between “real” and “pseudo” patients presenting at psychiatric hospitals in the United States. All of Rosenhan’s “pseudo” patients (college students/researchers involved in the experiment) were admitted and given a psychotic label, and all the subsequent behaviour of the researchers—including their note-taking—was labelled by staff as further symptoms of their disorder (for a summary, see Burstow 2015: 75-76). This research was a culmination of earlier studies on labelling and mental illness which had begun in the 1960s with Irving Goffman (1961) and Thomas Scheff (1966). Goffman’s (1961) ethnographic study of psychiatric incarceration demonstrated many of the features which Rosenhan’s study would later succinctly outline, including the arbitrary nature of psychiatric assessment, the labelling of patient behaviour as further evidence of “mental illness,” and the processes of institutional conformity by which the inmates learned to accept such labels if they wanted to have any chance of being released from the institution at a later date. Scheffs (1966) work on diagnostic decision making in psychiatry formulated a general labelling theory for the sociology of mental health. Again, his research found that psychiatrists made arbitrary and subjective decisions on those designated as “mentally ill,” sometimes retaining people in institutions even when there was no evidence to support such a decision. Psychiatrists, he argued, relied on a common sense set of beliefs and practices rather than observable, scientific evidence. Scheff (1966) concluded that the labelling of a person with a “mental illness” was contingent on the violation of social norms by low-status rule-breakers who are judged by higher status agents of social control (in this case, the psychiatric profession). Thus, according to these studies, the nature of “mental illness” is not a fixed object of medical study but rather a form of “social deviance”—a moral marker of societal infraction by the powerful inflicted on the powerless." -Bruce Cohen, Psychiatric Hegemony, 2016

[awholefuckinglifetimeofthis]

abandoning my morals to go into psychiatry just so that I can lobby for opioids becoming mental health meds

[autolenaphilia]

I don’t care about accusations of ”pedophilia.” I will not give a fuck, I won't investigate your claims, I will just ignore it.

For one thing the accusation of pedophilia is often entirely meaningless. This is because pedophile/pedo etc are words that carry the taint of child rape, of calling up the disgust such an act naturally produces, but are accusations that don’t require such an act or a victim of it. If you call someone a “child rapist” that has weight, but you also have to back it up with a victim this person supposedly raped for the accusation to actually be meaningful. But words like “pedophile” carries no such demands, it literally just means “someone who has an attraction to children.” It doesn’t require an actual victim. It’s an accusation about how someone feels in their head and can thus be liberally applied. Someone criticizes your asinine submarine idea to rescue some children in a cave? Call them a pedo. And even words that once had a more specific meaning, such as “grooming” can be stretched beyond all meaning to mean whatever it wants to. Someone talked to under-18 people about sex and gender in a way you don’t want to? Call them a groomer.

In a culture of pedohysteria, pedojacketing is easy. And it’s especially easy to weaponize it against queer people, the idea that queerness spreads through queers recruiting children by molesting them is one of the oldest queerphobic narrativeness out there. I’m using “queer” here because this is a narrative used both against gay and trans people. But in the present transphobic/transmisogynistic backlash it’s most often used against trans people, especially transfems, as transmasc people are more often infantilized.

But on a more deeper level “pedophilia” is the wrong framing of the real problem of child sex abuse. It’s literally a medical term, a diagnosis. It makes child sex abuse a problem of some sick individuals with a diseased attraction.

This is of course a bad and antifeminist understanding of what rape and sexual violence is. It’s an inevitable and natural expression of power. The widespread rape of women is caused by the patriarchy, of men having power over women. And the misogynist oppression of women with sexual violence naturally extends to young girls. But all children are disempowered in our society. Adults have power over them in the patriarchal family, in the capitalist school system and other institutions of our society. Sexual violence against children flows from the power adults institutionally and systemically have over them. The vast majority of sexual violence towards children comes from the family and schools, not the “stranger danger” of creepy weirdoes hiding in bushes.

This is the reality that the framing of sexual violence as the result of sick individuals with a diseased attraction obscures. And it inevitably calls for a reactionary carceral and psychiatric response, justifying the police, prisons and psychiatric institutions. That’s why “what will we then do with the pedophiles?” is such a popular clichéd response to prison and police abolitionism. This very framing of the problem calls for a carceral response. If the problem of child sex abuse is sick individuals instead of the system, if we constantly root out and punish individuals we will eventually solve the problem.

In reality carceral responses actually make the problem of sexual violence much worse. The police, prisons and involuntary psychiatric hospitals are violent expressions of power and thus create the conditions for rape.

Pedohysteria is constantly used to justify the expansion of state power. Here in European Union we have had a legislative push to ban end-to-end encryption and make all online communication accessible to law enforcement, total online surveillance. And the reasoning is because otherwise pedophiles can use e2e communication to secretly send child porn to each other without the police being able to do anything, which is of course true, that does and will happen, but doesn’t justify killing all online privacy. This “chat control” act is literally called “regulation to prevent and combat child sexual abuse.”

The pedohysteria also justifies vigilantism, which tumblr callout culture is part of and is also a deeply reactionary and even fascist phenomenon. Vigilantism rests on the idea that what the police do is right, but they are not doing it well enough, because they are too reigned in by liberal ideas such as laws and regulations and the courts. So random people should take on the role of police to punish “criminals”, like pedophiles. And this goes through tumblr callout culture. A subtext running through pedojacketing callouts of transfems is the idea that transmisogyny does not exist and does not lead to transfems being disproportionately punished, but instead transfems are using their minority status to get away with sex crimes.

This standard conservative rhetoric about how liberals often literally let minorities get away with murder justifies their reactionary vigilantism. Of course in reality, transfems are far less likely to commit sexual abuse of children than other groups of people, because we are systematically excluded from the very institutions where such abuse happens, such as parenthood/the family or schools, because of the transmisogynist stereotype that we are all perverted child rapists. And the callouts of transfems as sex predators are in themselves abusive and protect actual abusers, just like how police and prisons are.

So no, I will continue to not give a fuck if you call someone a pedophile.

[kazoo-world]

okay. i debated not posting this because I was worried I’d get death threats (that says a lot doesn’t it) but it needs to be said, because its upsetting me.

a woman who publicly says she feels very sane and has “never been to therapy” and who breaks up with her boyfriend in part because he can’t just “”get over”” his depression to love her the way she wants/needs does not.

I repeat, does not.

get to use the imagery she did in her fortnight video.

I’ve been seeing gifsets and screenshots all day of her chained to a bed but ~aesthetic~ and being fed a pill after a cheeky side eye and strapped to a glamourfied ECT machine and no one has said anything about it so I will. those images are genuinely triggering for me.

people have been restrained, forcefed pills, and given electroconvulsive therapy or subjected to the electric chair for severe mental illness against their will. these are not fun props anyone gets to throw around to express that they feel depressed or in a “manic phase” or like they were “raised in an asylum.”

she doesn’t know how a real asylum fried my grandmother’s brain or real cops restrained me because I was psychotic and manic. she doesn’t know what it feels like to be dehumanised that way.

do better. demand she do better, too.

edit: I say that this content is triggering to say that it causes real harm. I do still have a responsibility to myself to curate an internet experience for myself. this does not negate her responsibility to avoid replicating harmful tropes in art which is deeply influential. she does not get to co-opt institutionalization or psychiatric violence as a romanticized aesthetic or as a metaphor because real people like myself have suffered greatly under the things she is representing as glamorous or cool. institutionalization silences and violates mentally ill people in a way that marginalizes them, and that experience should be treated with sensitivity and care rather than being commodified to reduce stigma. if she had experienced these things, I might feel differently, but other ableist content on the record and her statements on her life and art indicate otherwise. she is a woman with immense privilege and power and should not be using that privilege and power to punch down on mental illness.

edit 2: I want you all to know I have seen your criticism. I will not edit the post but I do respect that she has had mental health struggles since that outdated quote. That is my mistake, I own that. My apologies.

However, mental health struggles =/ experience with psychiatric violence. Experiences of mental illness are heterogenous. Aestheticizing, romanticizing, and glamourizing mental hospitals is straight up gross regardless of your experience with mental illness. It’s tasteless and offensive.

I do understand metaphors. I think that her calling her life an asylum as a metaphor is in poor taste. I think her representing her relationship struggles with the imagery of a mental institution is insensitive given the impacts that real asylums and mental hospitals have had on my life and the lives of many others like me, so I had to say something about it.

It’s ableist to assume that critics of your fav “can’t read”, “don’t understand a metaphor” or “don’t have brains” when they clearly demonstrate that they are thinking critically. Do better.